How & why the South took command of India’s skies

Aviation in India is that rare thing – a sureshot growth industry. But there’s a fascinating story within this story. The South — Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Kerala — dominates aviation. Slice and dice the data any which way, southern states together fly far above every other region. And much of this change has happened over the last 10 years. Plus, in some ways, the southern aviation market has started resembling mature markets in advanced countries.

South Rules, Domestic Or International

Take recent data. Between April 2025 and March 2026, 41 out of every 100 international passengers crossing India’s borders did so through a southern airport. The northern region, including Delhi, accounted for 28. The West, including Mumbai, managed 25, per Airports Authority of India numbers.
The domestic picture is just as striking. Southern airports carried one crore more passengers than the North, and 1.44 crore more than the West, despite the fact that Delhi and Mumbai, India’s two busiest airports, sit in the northern and western regions.



Interestingly, a decade ago, the race was much tighter. The West led with about five crore annual domestic passengers, followed by the North at 4.8 crore, and the South at 4.6 crore. But by 2024-25, the South had crossed the 10-crore domestic passenger mark. The other regions are still waiting to get there.

Below Vindhyas, it’s like the US or Japan

This is not just a story of bigger airports or fuller flights. It is the story of an aviation market that has matured differently.

The govt’s UDAN scheme, whose first flight took off in April 2017, is perhaps the clearest map of where Indian aviation still needs help. Of the 923 routes awarded nationally, UP alone accounts for 96, while Uttarakhand has another 81. Together, these two states have been awarded more routes than all the southern states combined, according to data from Rajya Sabha replies.

But awarding routes is one thing. Survival is another.

In Uttar Pradesh, UDAN flights commenced on 56 routes, but 20 were shut within three years, the highest discontinuation for any state. Uttarakhand followed with 16 discontinued routes, and Assam with 12. The contrast with the South is telling. AAI and UDAN data suggest that southern India has a more mature aviation market, where even smaller airports generate durable, year-round demand.

In that sense, parts of southern India are beginning to resemble aviation ecosystems seen in countries such as US, Japan, Canada, Australia and Norway.

In US, a traveller from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, can board a regional aircraft to Chicago, connect to a domestic jet service to New York, and then continue on a long-haul international flight to Delhi. In Japan, turboprops link remote islands and regional centres, such as Tokunoshima, to Kagoshima, feeding passengers into larger national hubs. The defining feature of such systems is a seamless progression: small regional aircraft, then domestic jet services, then international long-haul flights.

This structure is now increasingly visible in the South.

Take Rajahmundry, the textile hub often called the “Bombay of the South”. IndiGo and Fly91 together operate 10 daily departures from Hyderabad to the city. It is an hour-long hop on an ATR aircraft, compared with about seven hours by road. The first ATR leaves Hyderabad for Rajahmundry at 6. 50am; the last departs at 8pm. Rajahmundry is also connected by non-stop flights to Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chennai.

The comparison with Cedar Rapids is instructive. This city in Iowa, the world’s largest cornprocessing centre, is connected to Chicago with eight daily non-stop flights, though by faster regional jets. Like in the case of Cedar Rapids, Rajahmundry’s network shows how deeply air connectivity has begun to penetrate.

Compare this with airports serving similarly sized cities in other parts of India, and the South’s distinct aviation model becomes apparent. The region has what analysts might call a full aviation stack: regional turboprops connecting smaller cities, narrow-body jets on trunk routes between state capitals and major metros, and a strong international layer above them. Each tier feeds the next.

This is a structure that the north and west, for all their traffic volumes, have not yet replicated at scale.

Consider IndiGo, India’s largest airline. According to an aviation official, the airline deploys about 60% of its regional ATR turboprop fleet across just three stations: Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Chennai.

What makes South the leader

Aviation experts TOI spoke to identified the South’s economic dynamism as the key reason.

“Demand in the South is not reliant on one or two large metros, but distributed across a network of economically active cities… these have strong interlinkages across technology, manufacturing, healthcare, education and exports,” said Ashish Chhawchharia, partner, Grant Thornton Bharat. “This creates a more resilient and diversified traffic base, compared to regions where demand is concentrated around a few hubs or seasonal travel.”

Tamil Nadu has Chennai, Coimbatore, Madurai, Tiruchirappalli, Salem and Thoothukudi, each sustaining regular scheduled flight services independently. Karnataka has Bengaluru, Mysuru, Hubballi and Belagavi. Andhra Pradesh has Vijayawada, Tirupati, Rajahmundry, Kadapa and Kurnool.

“These are not subsidised experiments in regional connectivity. They are commercial decisions, made because the demand is there, day after day, flight after flight,” said the aviation official quoted earlier.

Suprio Banerjee, vice-president and co-group head, Corporate Ratings, ICRA, said the south’s passenger strength is rooted in its economic structure, airport infrastructure network, and the presence of key cities, which generate frequent business travel to both domestic and international destinations.

The dominance of IT services, with Bengaluru and Hyderabad emerging as major hubs for client-facing technology roles, along with the region’s start-up and venture capital ecosystem, has helped push both international traffic, and short-haul domestic travel between Southern metros, he said.

Chhawchharia added that a key differentiator for the South is its early “industrialisation” in sectors that drive high-frequency air travel, particularly IT services, global capability centres, electronics, pharmaceuticals, and advanced manufacturing. These industries attract talent from across the country, creating sustained air traffic into cities such as Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai.

“These cities function as national business gateways with deep domestic and international connectivity needs. At the same time, Tier-2 markets are more integrated into the formal economy, sustaining demand beyond metro-to-metro routes,” he said.

As GCCs multiply across the region and data centre investments pour in, that demand base keeps compounding. “Economically anchored routes tend to deliver more stable, recurring passenger flows over time,” said Chhawchharia.

UDAN data reinforces that point. The North has a larger operational UDAN network, with 215 routes, compared with 141 in the South. But it has also seen far higher route attrition. Discontinued routes in the North are equivalent to 26% of its operationalised network. In the South, the figure is just 12%. Kerala leads the UDAN success list, with 12 routes operationalised and none discontinued.

The Kerala (aviation) story

Kerala’s contribution to the South’s aviation dominance, however, comes from a very different engine: international traffic.

At Kozhikode, 76% of all passengers are international travellers. At Thiruvananthapuram, international passengers outnumber domestic ones, 53% to 47%. At most Indian airports, including Delhi and Mumbai, the typical split is around 30% international and 70% domestic. Kerala’s overseas traffic, driven largely by its Gulf links and migration economy, is a major reason why Southern states have accounted for around 40% of India’s international traffic for at least a decade.

Airports matter, too

Infrastructure has also played a decisive role in the South’s aviation success story.

Delhi and Mumbai have been operating beyond comfortable capacity for decades, their terminals and runways stretched by demand that long outpaced supply. Both cities have only recently begun to address the problem, with Navi Mumbai airport commissioned in December 2025 and Noida-Jewar airport set to commence operations this month, corrections that were decades overdue.

The South, by contrast, entered the modern airport era with newer runways and cleaner blueprints. Bengaluru’s Kempegowda International Airport and Hyderabad’s Rajiv Gandhi International Airport are both greenfield facilities that opened in 2008. They were purpose-built, modern airports designed for growth, unlike Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata, whose infrastructure carries the weight of seven or eight decades of incremental expansion.

Today, four of India’s ten busiest airports by passenger traffic are in the South: Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Kochi. No other region matches that concentration. Bengaluru is already planning a massive second airport. Visakhapatnam is preparing for its next chapter too, with Bhogapuram International Airport expected to open soon. It will serve a city rapidly emerging as a hub for artificial intelligence, data centres, and global capability centres, attracting investments from Google, Reliance, TCS, Infosys, and Capgemini, among others.

Inverting Aviation History

Indian aviation, of course, began its commercial journey in the West. In 1932, JRD Tata flew his historic airmail service from Karachi to Mumbai, via Ahmedabad. For decades thereafter, Mumbai had India’s busiest airport, and the Western corridor remained the gravitational centre of Indian flying: the busiest routes, the thickest traffic, the headquarters of the national carrier.

But Mumbai’s congested airport could not keep pace with demand. Around the turn of the century, Delhi overtook it to become the country’s busiest airport.

Now, that geography of dominance has been redrawn again.

The signs were visible as early as 2007-08 in AAI’s own segment revenue data. That year, the South generated revenue of Rs 1,538 crore, the highest of any region in the country, ahead of the West’s Rs 1,150 crore, and the North’s Rs 995 crore. In the years since, the South has only strengthened its lead.

Indian aviation once moved along a West-to-North axis, from Mumbai’s old dominance to Delhi’s rise. The next chapter is being written further south, across a lattice of business cities, temple towns, Gulf gateways, textile hubs, technology centres, and new airports.

The south is not merely adding passengers. It is building a whole new aviation system.

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